AS 
36 

A&5 

v.2l 


COMMEMORATIVE  TRIBUTE  TO 

HENRY  ADAMS 

By  PAUL  ELMER  MORE 


PREPARED  FOR 

THE  AMERICAN  ACADEMY  OF 
ARTS  AND  LETTERS 

1920 


AMERICAN  ACADEMY  OF 

ARTS  AND  LETTERS 

1922 


A  Uo' 
V.     Ll 


Copyright,    1922,    by 
THE  AMERICAN   ACADEMY  OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


THE   DE   VINNE   PRESS 
NEW   YORK 


HENRY  ADAMS 

BY  PAUL  E.  MORE 

By  the  death  of  Henry  Adams,  in 
March  of  1918,  in  his  eighty-first  year, 
the  Academy  lost  a  member  distin 
guished  in  many  ways,  a  man  who 
reveled  in  all  the  riddles  of  life  and 
himself  left  for  those  curious  in  the 
natural  history  of  the  human  soul  a 
riddle  not  easily  solved.  In  one  re 
spect  he  was  American  by  every  fiber 
of  his  being.  Great-grandson  of  the 
second  President  of  the  United  States, 
grandson  of  a  later  President,  son  of 
the  Minister  to  the  Court  of  St. 
James's  during  the  trying  years  of  the 
Civil  War,  reared  in  a  tradition  of  al 
most  chauvinistic  patriotism,  he  might 


ACADEMY  NOTES 

M52233 


THE  AMERICAN  ACADEMY 


be  regarded  as  an  impersonation  of 
that  New  Englandism  which  pene 
trated  the  bones  and  marrow  of  the 
national  character.  And  he  was, 
throughout  life,  acutely  conscious  of 
his  inheritance. 

Yet  from  another  side  he  was  con 
spicuously  un-American ;  and  of  this, 
too,  he  was  conscious,  and  never  felt 
really  at  home  in  the  land  of  his  an 
cestors.  It  was  a  difference  in  mind, 
in  thought,  which,  whatever  else  may 
be  said,  has  not  been  "the  master  part 
of  us,"  and  which  was  so  in  Henry 
Adams.  This  is  not  to  say  that  Amer 
ica  is  mentally  sluggish,  or  has  failed 
of  large  accomplishment  in  scholar 
ship  and  invention  and  the  arts;  but 
that  detached  intellectuality  which  dis 
solves  the  substance  of  life  into  a  ques 
tion,  that  restless  inquisitiveness  which 
pierces  all  veils  of  custom  and  is  only 
strengthened  the  more  it  is  baffled, 
that  outreaching  of  "the  imperious 


ACADEMY  NOTES 


OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


lonely  thinking  power"  which  makes 
an  imprisonment  of  its  very  freedom, 
the  spirit,  in  a  word,  which  Matthew 
Arnold  described  in  his  Empedocles, — 
these  are  distinctly  not  American,  and 
they  distinctly  are  what  characterize 
Henry  Adams. 

The  variety  of  his  intellectual 
achievement  is  more  remarkable  than 
their  magnitude.  As  a  teacher  of  his 
tory  at  Harvard  for  seven  years  he 
was  one  of  the  .pioneers  of  the  semi 
nary  method  of  study.  Besides  other 
more  or  less  notable  works  in  this  field 
he  published  a  History  of  Jefferson's 
and  Madison's  Administrations,  mon 
umental  in  bulk,  and  almost  unique  in 
its  combination  of  documentary  re 
search,  philosophical  reflection,  and 
literary  charm.  He  divulged  a  scien 
tific  theory  of  the  periods  of  human 
growth  and  decline  in  history  which 
is  strikingly  original  and,  it  must  be 
added,  rather  sad.  For  six  years  he 


AND  MONOGRAPHS 


THE  AMERICAN  ACADEMY 


edited  the  North  American  Review, 
then  the  most  solid  magazine  of  the 
country.  He  wrote  two  novels,  one 
of  which,  Democracy,  aroused  a  good 
deal  of  heated  comment  by  its  satirical 
picture  of  Washington  political  soci 
ety.  He  composed  verse,  not  much  in 
quantity,  but  weighted  with  thought 
and  emotion  and  technically  more  than 
respectable.  His  letters,  printed  since 
his  death,  show  him  to  have  been  a 
master  of  the  quaint  and  whimsical  in 
this  delicate  genre.  Above  all  he  has 
left  two  books  of  extraordinary  qual 
ity,  his  Education  and  his  Mont-Saint- 
Michel  and  Chartres,  one  of  which  is 
like  the  portrait  of  a  naked  mind 
caught  by  some  art  of  spiritual  pho 
tography,  the  other  of  which  has  made 
the  whole  mental  and  emotional  life 
of  the  twelfth  century  a  vehicle  for 
the  same  insatiate  personality.  This, 
however  one  may  judge  the  individual 
works,  is  a  record  scarcely  paralleled 


ACADEMY  NOTES 


OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


by  the  production  of  any  other  Amer 
ican  author. 

In  the  long  run  interest  probably 
will  center  on  the  last  two  works,  the 
Education  and  the  Mont-Saint-Michel. 
By  education  Adams  meant  not  at  all 
the  mere  accumulation  of  knowledge, 
of  which,  nevertheless,  he  had  abun 
dance,  but  that  insight  into  the  nature 
of  things  which  should  enable  a  man 
to  know  what  the  world  is  and  what 
he  himself  is,  and  so  to  adjust  his  life 
to  the  forces  that  play  upon  it.  In  that 
sense  education  came  to  our  Acade 
mician  slowly,  if  it  came  at  all,  and 
the  pages  of  his  autobiography  are  a 
continual,  and  sometimes  a  bitter, 
complaint  over  the  fact  that  he,  the 
heir  of  all  the  ages  and  of  all  the 
Adamses,  should  be  held  at  bay  by  the 
baffling  sphinx  of  existence.  He  sent 
his  intellect  to  work  in  the  various 
fields  of  learning  of  which  the  cen 
tury  was  so  proud — history,  science, 


AND  MONOGRAPHS 


THE  AMERICAN  ACADEMY 


politics,  art,  religion — seeking  an 
answer  to  the  question  everywhere  put 
to  him :  Why  are  you  here,  and  who 
am  I  who  set  you  here?  Only  at  the 
end  of  his  life  did  he  read  the  riddle, 
and  for  those  who  read  his  books  left 
another  riddle  to  solve. 

Standing  before  the  great  dynamo 
at  the  Paris  Exposition,  in  1900,  he 
thought  he  saw  in  that  wheel,  revolv 
ing  with  such  vertiginous  speed,  so 
terribly  silent,  so  majestically  regular 
in  its  motion,  a  symbol  of  the  ruthless, 
impersonal  force  which  science  discov 
ers  at  the  center  of  the  universe : 
"Among  the  thousand  symbols  of  ulti 
mate  energy,  the  dynamo  was  not  so 
human  as  some,  but  it  was  the  most 
expressive."  Then  from  this  inhuman 
sign  he  turned,  by  a  kind  of  revulsion 
of  feeling,  to  what  \vas  most  opposite 
to  it  in  every  respect.  He  wrote  his 
book  to  show  that  the  Virgin  Mother 
of  God,  in  whose  honor  the  cathe- 


ACADEMY  NOTES 


OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 

7 

dral  of  Chartres  had  been  raised  and 

adorned,  was  the  real  object  of  wor 

ship  in  the  Middle  Ages  just  because 

she   was  the  symbol  and   warrant  of 

something    inconsequent,    whimsically 

merciful,    contemptuous    of    law,    hu 

man,  feminine,  in  the  governing  of  the 

world.     That  he   should  have  turned 

from  one  to  the  other  of  these  forces 

is  not  strange,  but  that  he  should  have 

found  it  consonant  to  adore  them  to 

gether  is  a  feat  of  audacious  thinking, 

if  not  of  education. 

AND  MONOGRAPHS 

14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

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